Senate Democrats reach sequester deal

Senate Democrats said Thursday they will move ahead with a roughly $110 billion budget package — evenly divided between new tax revenues and spending cuts — to forestall the across-the-board sequester cuts due to take effect March 1.

“We have a deal,” said Majority Leader Harry Reid after a party luncheon.

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That leaves precious little time before the billions in across-the-board cuts take effect and Reid faces an uphill climb finding Republican partners. Nonetheless, his bill is the first sign of legislative movement after weeks of finger-pointing, and Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told reporters that if senators “are willing to pass a bill, we’ll find some way to work with them to address this problem.”

Boehner is betting that Reid will fail and the speaker seems content to rest on a sequester-replacement bill passed by the House in the previous Congress. But that House package is its own political box canyon and puts Republicans right back to litigating many of the economic fairness and Latino issues that dogged them in the 2012 elections.

By comparison, Reid seems determined to learn from 2012 and play those cards to his advantage in what will become increasingly a public relations battle as the cuts approach.

The Democrat’s goal is to buy 10 months in which Congress and the White House could potentially implement a larger budget deal to put to rest the continued threat of the deep cuts threatening the Pentagon and domestic appropriations every year.

With this in mind, Reid leaves the most difficult benefit cuts to future talks with President Barack Obama. Instead, he takes about $55 billion in savings from either outdated farm subsidies or future defense spending after 2015.

In turn, the lion’s share of the tax revenues would come from a new 30 percent minimum tax on those with adjusted gross income of more than $1 million annually.